It was an evening spent on the front porch of the Rad Pad with Erik and Fish, consulting cigars and ale. Rad Pad is the misleadingly casual name given to a house perched on a hill in the desert, one part ranch, one part rustic museum and one part bachelor pad. We munched and sipped and watched the sun drift behind the Cascades, and waxed philosophic about life, the universe and everything. It was on this porch, swinging in flying chairs while listening to a gurgling pond to be filled with flesh-eating goldfish, that I may have finally come to a decision.

I will run. I will bound to the horizon and wrest the sun out of the sky. It has been a terrific journey thus far, but I’m just getting warmed up. I know not what will satisfy the wanderlust, not where my restless feet will carry me, but I know that the resolve is now strong enough that it will be somewhere. Somewhere new. Something different. The passion for life is insatiable and I am not ready to curl my toes into the soil and call it good. Not yet.

Like all things worthwhile, this will be difficult. The mere thought of uprooting from Bend, of leaving behind my mountains, rivers and sage, tightens my gut. The depth of this landscape exceeds my most vivid dreams. I don’t know if I have the stomach to say goodbye to my friends again. Hopkins. Duluth. Ihduhapi. Hood River. Everywhere I travel I have found an incredible group of people to laugh with, to lean on, to cry over. The closest friends have been the ones who can see the soul, and they are the ones who understand the wanderlust. They understand that in moving on I am not leaving them, but completing myself. To them there are no sad goodbyes, only happy reunions. It is these friends who form the core of my being; I know that without their support I could never do any of this, and for them I am eternally grateful.

I will bow out gracefully. For how much I lose whenever I leave home, the gains have always been infinitely greater. There are wild swaths of life that I would never have crossed had I decided that a particular somewhere was good enough. I have left great things in my wake, a few good stories, and a legend or two. Wherever it is, I am always welcome. I can always go home.

My time in Bend has been the longest I have lived in one place since leaving my hometown nest of eighteen years. I have been here long enough for all my flesh and bone to renew itself and absorb into my body the desert sun, the churning rivers, the pungent juniper. Molecule for molecule, I have transformed into the landscape I love. I am living in, and I have become, everything I have always wanted.

And hence the growing itch in my back, to shoulder a pack again and venture into the wild. I know that there are new things to experience, more adventures to be had, and I shake with nervous anticipation of what the coming years will hold. I will not feign knowledge of the future, but I know that I am in control of this life and can take it wherever I wish.

We will run. We will transform this body into a Force of Terrible Reckoning. We will climb Mount Hood this fall and we will see what comes next.

I fixed a few issues with the Photolog templates, so things should look much nicer. It’s still missing basic functionality like previous, next and back buttons, but I’ve already had my fill in dealing with Movable Type for the week. I’ve also got a number of photos that chronicle the last six months, and as soon as I finish up with their processing I’ll toss them up.

Our weather has been fairly miserable the last few days, at least by Bend standards for August. A week ago we were still slammin’ forward with endless sunshine, 90° days and 60° nights, but everything turned last Thursday evening during our hailstorm bouldering session. Since then we’ve been been having clouds, wind and spitting rain during the day, and at night the temperature had been dropping into the mid 40s. It’s August. I’m wearing long pants and running the heater at night. It reminds me of living in Duluth, which shows just how crappy the weather really is in that town. Lovingly crappy, or Crappily lovely, depending on how you take it.

But then, I need bad weather. I experienced the same burnout last summer in Hood River, where I existed under gorgeous skies for three solid months, became a meadhead and cooked my brain. Nice weather presents a perfect opportunity to run around outside and screw off, but when the good times never stop you never get an opportunity to pause and reflect.

One thing about Duluth is that it offered plenty of time for personal reflection, perhaps too much time, as some people are prone to allowing their reflection turn to brooding, fretting, or other mental games that are conducive to misery. One thing about biking, climbing and other intense outdoors activities is that they definitely keep the mind occupied, and conveniently sidestep the existential quandries that dog an idle mind.

When you slip off a log and smack hard into a pine tree, the questions of whether or not you’re making a difference in the world, or whether or not you might be happier doing something else, don’t find themselves too difficult to resolve. Difference? Of course you’re making a difference. As soon as you can move your arm again you’re gonna make this tree sorry it ever tasted the sky. Happier? Of course you’d be happier doing something else. Biking on logs is the stupidest idea you’ve ever had in your life. As soon as you get home you’re gonna sell the bike and never leave the house again. The neighborhood has plenty of stray cats. You could eat for months.

The insta-answers are fed by adrenaline and their initial appeal doesn’t last forever, but the clarity of resolve is refreshing at times where you find your brain suffocating itself. Too much action without reflection, however, and the knee-jerk emotional responses start becoming the norm, and the ability to find yourself rationally from one end of the world to the other fades and becomes increasingly difficult.

All in all, a balance must be sought between action and reflection, emotion and reason, and that balance must be respected. Thus, even though it is an August night and I find myself layering hemp sweaters, I am thankful for this breather from insanity.

I’m slowly tearing this body apart, and I’m not sure how much longer it’s going to last. Last Tuesday I skipped out of work at noon to go bouldering with Mark and Laura out at Skeleton Cave, a beefy lava tube just out of town. We strapped on our chalk bags and climbing shoes, bouldered for a couple hours, and impressed some blind cave people who came scurrying up from the depths. The plan was to spend the afternoon climbing at Smith, but we were tired and burned out so we took naps and went to the Bend Brewing Company and watched the Olympics and peed out of trees, instead.

I took a sanity break from work on Wednesday and finally got out to Smith Rock with Mark and Laura, where we climbed Bunny Face and Lycopodophyta. By afternoon our brains were cooked from the intense heat, so we packed up, slogged out of the river valley and made our way back to Bend.

Thursday I ducked out of work early to go bouldering with Jody down along the Deschutes River. We spent our time sessioning a neat traverse problem and hiding from intermittent hailstorms, and took a couple hours in figuring out a gnarly, gnarly finishing move on the traverse. The move has nothing for hands, nothing for feet, and demands that you stem out right for a smear that isn’t there, reach far right for a hold that doesn’t exist, and stick your left foot in your ear so you can yard up and slap into a bomber hold above your head.

On Friday afternoon I left work early (notice a pattern, here?) to go climbing at Smith with Ned, a fellow who Jody and I met during our session at the Deschutes. Our intent was to hit up White Satin, a sweet three-pitch climb in the Smith Rock Group.

Ultimately we followed the wrong bolt line up some filthy nasty rock, and spent the next couple hours figuring out how we were going to rappel off 100 meters of rock with a 60 meter rope. It took a few false starts, some clever scouting and a bit of ingenuity, but we eventually reached a set of anchors that we could use to rappel back to the ground. Even though we didn’t make White Satin and never got our multi-pitch, it turned out the be an epic session regardless. We celebrated by throwing ourselves up Moonshine, a bomber 5.9 trad climb, in the dark.

This afternoon, Ned and I hit up Smith again, with the intent of finishing off White Satin. Unfortunately, when we arrived there was already a group on White Satin (who would stay there until 8:00 at night, having their own epic session wrought with Challenge and Danger) so we headed towards Sky Ridge, hoping to still cram some multi-pitch into the day. The approach to Sky Ridge is a nasty, exposed, unprotected 5.4 scramble, which we did while getting rocked by winds from a storm ramping up in the Cascades. Once we reached the base of Sky Ridge we decided the wind was bad enough that we didn’t want to attempt a multi-pitch, so we down-climbed the approach.

Down-climbed. A freakin’ sketchy 5.4, with no protection, while wearing a backpack filled with ropes and junk. Ned is a mountaineering guide by trade and profession so he had no trouble getting down, but for the first time in my climbing life I felt sketched by the height and exposure. One false move, a missed hand hold or an unexpected twist from my Chacos, and it was a thirty foot drop to the ground. I simply took my time, told myself that both falling and panicking were not options at this time, and eventually found myself to the solid ground.

We swung over to Testament Slab in the Christian Brothers, and climbed Nightingale’s On Vacation, Revelations and Irreverence. Nightingale’s is supposedly a 5.10b, but it feels more like a solid 5.9 with a 5.10b crux. Revelations is a 5.9 with some of the ballsiest bolt placements you’ll ever see, with a first bolt that is 30 feet off the ground. If Nightingale’s is supposed to be a 5.10b, then Irreverence cannot possibly be a 5.10a, as its sustained moves are far more difficult than those of Nightingale’s. I’d say Irreverence is a sustained 5.10b with a few 5.10c moves, but I suppose it’s not my call.

Ratings aside, as Ned dropped down from Irreverence the sun had dipped low enough to poke out from under the cloud veil of the Cascades, scorching the medieval towers of Smith and igniting a triple rainbow that arched over the entire park. It was very cool and very spiritual, and it took my over-stimulated mind off of how incredibly tired my body has been feeling.

Five straight days of climbing. For tomorrow, I am praying for huge thunderstorms and rainbows galore, as I am supposed to bike thirty-some-odd miles from Mount Bachelor to Bend with my friends Shane and Erin. In the last few weeks I have lost every ounce of my will power to resist pushing my meat body to its breaking point, and I fear now that the only thing that can save me from myself would be an act of god.

Tomorrow can be only biking or thunderstorms. The universe itself has converted to binary notation.

Note: If there are an abnormal number of typos tonight, it’s because I spent the entire evening bouldering down on the Deschutes, and my finger meat aches to the bone. I can’t feel the keyboard. All I feel is pain. Dusty, tasty, hail storm pain.

Over Fourth of July weekend I bought a watermelon. My friend Mark was visiting and he bought a watermelon as well, but his was seedless so we ate it instead. I kept my watermelon in the kitchen until it got mooshy, and then I put it out on our back deck. I should have tossed it out, but after a few weeks it turned yellow and started sagging and didn’t look much like a watermelon at all, more like a rottermelon. Now that it’s been sitting back there for over a month and a half I’m afraid to touch the rottermelon. When I kicked it two weeks ago, a whole family of fruit flies came out. I’m afraid that if I kick the rottermelon now, a litter of kittens are going to pop out.

So there on the deck it sits, alone, dejected, the poor lonely rottermelon. I will have to take care of it soon, as Erik is moving out of Lava House this week to go live in a squalid house in the country that is so backwards it doesn’t even have city plumbing. Or neighbors. If things pan out, I plan on ejecting from Lava House in late September to go live with my Mountain friends Shane and Erin.

Ever since our neighbor Mike moved out from across the street, the Lava neighborhood has been losing its mind. A small yap-yap dog now lives across the street, and I think it killed and ate its owners a few weeks ago in an attempt to gain ultimate sovereignity. I don’t know how the dog plans on paying utilities and rent in the coming months, but I know it loves the cars who drive down Lava and honk for no reason, and the dirty noisy jays who have taken over the World’s Dirtiest Elm Tree (which just happens to unfold right over my car), and the car alarms that go off all night long and sound like the toy gun aisle at Wal-Mart, and the drunk that stumbles up our driveway and demands that we give him beer or a ride to the 7-Eleven.

It would seem that Lava House has served its purpose, and while I will indeed miss being within stumbling distance of downtown, I believe it is time to move on to something different. In the meantime, this house is in complete disarray. Erik’s move has uncovered new and exciting locales of intense filth, and as his domestic items make their way out into the juniper and sage, I’m left floundering for something to sit on, something to cook with, or something to sleep on. Ultimately, everything ends up on the floor, and I’ll probably raid my camping gear for any culinary artifacts I require in the coming weeks. What I will miss most, however, will be the spooning.

My room is an absolute mess. There’s a four foot pile of kiteboarding and windsurfing junk between me and my closet, which isn’t too inconvenient considering that most of my clothes are piled on the floor. My backpack is mixed in with that pile, and I have used it so much this summer that I need to rinse away the layers of salt rime deposited by my sweat. My bike blocks my bedroom door, and it will probably stay there until I fix the flat tire that I got riding at Swampy Lakes with Shane and Erin last Sunday. Random climbing components are strewn everywhere, left over from bouldering in Skeleton Cave with Laura and Mark, climbing at Smith Rock, or pumping tonight’s session on the Deschutes.

Yeah. Something needs to be done. But it doesn’t need to be done tonight. I’m just gonna nurse my sore fingers with some Australian wine and hang out on the front deck. The light over our front deck burned out two months ago, and I finally got around to replacing it with a black light.

Front deck. Not to be confused with the back deck, which is reserved for kittens and rottermelons.